Ideas & Trends;Undoing the Legacy of Nazi Courts

By GUSTAV NIEBUHR

Published: February 11, 1996

IN a famous moment of frustration described in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus, contending with the doubts of his fellow Galileans, declared, "A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country."

For centuries, those words have been used to describe the tribulations of the deserving. But rarely have they seemed so appropriate as they did last week, when a group of Lutheran church members and human rights advocates in Berlin denounced the fact that the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was condemned as a traitor by the Nazi SS court in 1945 for having helped to plot an assassination attempt against Hitler, is still legally a traitor in Germany. (Although the verdicts of Nazi people's courts were declared void a decade ago, that declaration did not cover the SS courts.)

The revelation that Bonhoeffer is still legally a traitor struck a chord here and in Germany, because Bonhoeffer is widely considered a Christian martyr. His writings on faith and civic responsibility appeal to people across religious, national and ideological lines.

Public demands for voiding the verdict against Bonhoeffer have been heard for nearly a year. Last April 9, on the 50th anniversary of Bonhoeffer's execution in the Flossenburg concentration camp, for example, the Lutheran Bishop Wolfgang Huber of Berlin-Brandenburg called for the verdict to be stricken, so the country could publicly acknowledge the unfairness of the Nazi SS courts.

In an interview, Bishop Huber said he would also like to see a move to clear the records of other people convicted by those courts, including Army deserters. "The fact that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a famous person, and these others are not famous but still alive," he said, "does not allow us to concentrate on Dietrich Bonhoeffer alone."

The demand for Bonhoeffer's legal rehabilitation suggests a gradual but profound shift in Germany's theological thought as well as a change in the democratic society that was built on the ashes of Hitler's Reich. It is as if Germany has finally caught up with the political ethics taught by Bonhoeffer.

"It hasn't been too long ago -- it's been 25 years -- that Bonhoeffer was regarded basically as a traitor by quite a few people of the conservative church establishment," said Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, a social ethicist at the University of Heidelburg. As recently as the 1970's, Bonhoeffer was seen by many as a man who had violated what was in Germany a foundational Christian teaching: obedience to the state.

This idea may strike many Americans as peculiar, for in this country there is a long history of civil disobedience and considerable sympathy for citizens who choose to follow their religious consciences over the dictates of secular rulers.

During the American Revolution, clergy members served as chaplains in Washington's army while many men in their congregations took up arms against the British crown. Since then, a significant number of American Christians have had little trouble finding biblical justification for civil disobedience, often of the peaceful type like that practiced by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but, occasionally the type characterized by fearsome violence like that of the abolitionist warrior John Brown.

Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms

For centuries, German Protestants read an opposite lesson in their tradition, for which they found justification in the writings of the Reformation leader Martin Luther. "The Reformation tradition among Lutherans is particularly wary of chaos in society," said Larry Rasmussen, a professor of social ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York, who teaches a course on Bonhoeffer. "Another way of saying this is you don't have a history of Christians being involved in overt resistance to the government in Germany."

Dr. Bedford-Strohm attributes this to generations of Germans taking Martin Luther's "doctrine of the two kingdoms" literally. Luther differentiated between the religious realm of the church, in which Christians are called to follow Jesus's teachings of love, and the political realm of the state, in which law, rather than love, applies. In civic life, according to this doctrine, the Christian is expected to obey government authorities.

Luther did not mean to suggest that rulers possessed an absolute right to do what they pleased without regard to fundamental standards of morality, Dr. Bedford-Strohm said. But, he added, in the 19th century, German theologians elaborated Luther's theory in a way that allowed for such an understanding.

"In that doctrine, bad government and inhuman governments profited," said Dr. Bedford-Strohm. "Hitler profited by it."

Bonhoeffer's "Letters and Papers from Prison," a posthumously published work still widely available, includes an essay marking 10 years of resistance to Nazism. What he had learned, he wrote, was that Germans were very good at civil obedience and sacrificing themselves for a larger cause. Where they fell short, he said, was in "the deed of free responsibility," in taking unlawful actions for moral reasons.

Between the 25th anniversary of Bonhoeffer's execution in 1970 and the 50th anniversay last year, the theologian's reputation has risen in Germany. That, Dr. Bedford-Strohm said, is the result of "a more mature attitude of Germans toward democracy," a transformation that has been hastened both by soul-searching among a younger generation of Christians and by the emergence of a civic philosophy of public dissent that is evident not only in the fight for Bonhoeffer's legal rehabilitation but also in the German environmental and anti-nuclear movements. And quite appropriately, this civic philosophy is due, in large part, to Bonhoeffer himself.

"People realized we should stand up for our ideas," Dr. Bedford-Strohm said. "And I think that is something that can never be changed."